a blog that reminds you: just stay calm. no need to sparkle.

Month: April 2003

Best books found so far… Mister & Mistress: The Other Woman’s Guide to Etiquette (written in 1939)… Bridge Babies (photos of babies making faces, captioned as though they were playing bridge)… How to Make Love to a Woman (written by some grad student at American University)…

Good-bye to New York City subway tokens. On May 4 they will be no longer be accepted as fare. A short history of the tokens is here in the Gotham Gazette: “As the tokens gained in value, petty criminals devised ingenious if revolting ways to get them. Crooks jammed the coin slot to keep the tokens from falling down. As the commuter walked off indignantly — out a token but unable to get through the gate — the perpetrator would swoop in and suck the token out of the turnstile.”

“Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person.” — Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet; download .pdf file here.

I’ve mulled the same questions about the future so many times that I’m actually sick of hearing my own mind think about them. It’s the questioning itself that’s got me in a trap now, and I’m tired of doubting and wondering and making plans with fifty gajillion alternate futures branching out into infinity. I would like to just quiet down for a bit.

“She has become an expert at confusing what is with what was with what should be with what could be. She avoids mirrors, and lifts a powerful telescope to find herself. She aims it into the sky, and can see, or so she thinks, past the blue, past the black, even past the stars, and back into a different black, and a different blue…” — Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated